Baseball (and Yankees) fans will devour this like ballpark popcorn, and all will muse about the many what-ifs of Martin’s...
A sympathetic examination of the fiery player and manager Billy Martin (1928-1989), who could dazzle between the lines but whose life outside the stadium was often boozy, libidinous, and rudderless.
Earlier in his own career, Pennington (On Par: The Everyday Golfer's Survival Guide, 2012, etc.), now a sportswriter with the New York Times, covered the Yankees during one of Martin’s five terms as manager under owner George Steinbrenner. The author even witnessed one of Billy the Kid’s late-career barroom brawls. As he notes, Martin, slated to return for his sixth stint as manager in 1990, was killed in an accident in his pickup truck on Christmas night—an accident the author both begins and ends with, devoting many pages to the controversy about who was driving that night, Martin or his friend William Reedy (who survived). Pennington interviewed myriads for this comprehensive work—from kings to commoners. Among the latter was a housekeeper at the end of Martin’s life, a woman who tried to make Billy more accurate at the urinal. Although he focuses principally on Martin’s professional career, Pennington also explores his family background in California, his lifelong problems with drinking, his fondness for fisticuffs (he would invariably swing first), his inability to be faithful to his wives (he was married four times), his cluelessness with money, and his celebrated feuds with Steinbrenner, Reggie Jackson, and others. All the notable moments are here—Cleveland’s Ten-Cent Beer Night, the dugout fracas with Jackson, the spats with umpires (the dirt-kicking and -throwing), the firings and rehirings. As the author shows, Martin could charm as well as disgust and disappoint, and Pennington argues that although his record merits the Hall of Fame, his erratic behavior has kept him outside.
Baseball (and Yankees) fans will devour this like ballpark popcorn, and all will muse about the many what-ifs of Martin’s motley life.Pub Date: April 7, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-544-02209-6
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Feb. 10, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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